Senators Assail C.I.A. Judgments on Iraq's Arms as Deeply Flawed

By DOUGLAS JEHL

The New York Times

July 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, July 9 In a scathing, unanimous report, the Senate Intelligence
Committee said Friday that the most pivotal assessments used to justify the war
against Iraq were unfounded and unreasonable, and reflected major missteps by
American intelligence agencies.

The detailed 511-page report, the result
of a yearlong review, found in particular that the stark prewar judgment by
American intelligence agencies that Iraq possessed chemical and biological
weapons had not been substantiated by the agencies' own reporting at the
time.

"Most of the major key judgments" in an October 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were
not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting," the committee report
said. "A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the
mischaracterization of intelligence."

In 117 separate conclusions, the
committee laid the blame squarely on what it portrayed as a sloppy,
dysfunctional intelligence structure headed by George J. Tenet, the director of
central intelligence. The report was the harshest Congressional indictment of
American intelligence agencies since the Church Committee report of the
mid-1970's on abuses of power by the C.I.A.

Among the central
findings, endorsed by all nine Republicans and eight Democrats on the committee,
were that a culture of "group think" in intelligence agencies left unchallenged
an institutional belief that Iraq had illicit weapons; that significant
shortcomings in human intelligence left the United States dependent on others
for information about Iraqi illicit weapons programs; and that intelligence
agencies too often failed to acknowledge the limited, ambiguous and even
contradictory nature of their information about Iraq and illicit arms.

"In the end, what the President and the Congress used to send the country to war
was information provided by the intelligence community, and that information was
flawed," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the panel's Republican
chairman.

Even Mr. Roberts, an ardent supporter of the war, said he was
not sure that Congress would have authorized the war had it known of the
flimsiness on which the prewar intelligence assessments were based.

At a
campaign appearance in Pennsylvania, President
Bush acknowledged that the report had been "quite critical" and that there
had indeed been "some failures" in the intelligence about Iraq's illicit
weapons. But he said he still believed that toppling Saddam Hussein justified
the conflict.

A spokesman for Senator
John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said of the
document: "Nothing in this report absolves the White House of its
responsibility for mishandling of the country's intelligence. The fact is that
when it comes to national security, the buck stops at the White House, not
anywhere else."

The Senate report was remarkable both for the severity
of its criticism and the fact that it reflected a bipartisan consensus rarely
seen in Congress. Democrats and Republicans alike said it underscored the
urgency of moving quickly to overhaul the country's intelligence agencies.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the
panel, said the intelligence failure on Iraq "will affect our national security
for years to come."

At the Central Intelligence Agency, John McLaughlin,
who takes over Sunday as the country's acting intelligence chief, said of the
Senate criticism, "We get it."

But he said he still believed that "the
judgments were not unreasonable when they were made nearly two years ago."

"We acknowledge with all that we have learned since then that we could have
done better," Mr. McLaughlin said. But he said the agency had seen no need to
dismiss anyone as a result of what he portrayed as honest, limited mistakes that
did not justify a broader indictment.

On another issue used by Mr. Bush
to justify the war, the committee said that intelligence agencies' prewar
judgments about the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda had generally been
reasonable, but that those judgments had been largely skeptical of the idea that
there were significant ties between them.

The Senate report focused
exclusively on the role played by intelligence agencies, and Democrats said they
wished it had addressed the question of how the Bush administration had used the
intelligence as a rationale for war. Under a deal reached earlier in the year
between the two parties, that issue was set aside for a later phase of the
inquiry, which is not likely to be completed before the November elections.

Mr. Bush and his aides have signaled that they are moving toward naming a
permanent successor to Mr. Tenet, who announced his resignation last month,
after the C.I.A. had begun to review the Senate report and its critical thrust
became broadly known. An announcement could come as early as next week,
according to administration officials, who said the candidates now included
Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who is widely admired by
Democrats as well as Republicans, and is seen as likely to win easy confirmation
in the Senate.

With the election only four months away, any intelligence
chief named by Mr. Bush could not count on a long tenure, a factor that could
make it difficult to enlist a candidate from outside the government. But
administration officials said Mr. Bush believed that the problems facing the
agency were too serious and the stakes too high to leave an acting director, Mr.
McLaughlin, in place for more than a limited time.

Roughly one-fifth of
the version of the report made public by the committee on Friday was blacked
out, reflecting material deleted at the insistence of the C.I.A. from a
classified version on which the panel finished work in May. Mr. Roberts and
Rockefeller, who won major concessions in weeks of negotiations over the
documents' release, said they would continue to try to persuade the C.I.A. to
agree that more of the document could be made public without harm to national
security.

On issues related to Iraq and terrorism, the report found that
American intelligence agencies had been reasonable in most of their prewar
judgments, including the idea that Mr. Hussein was most likely to use his own
intelligence service operatives, rather than terrorist organizations, to conduct
attacks.

It also described as reasonable the C.I.A.'s assessments that
contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda throughout the 1990's "did not add up to an
established formal relationship" and that "there was no evidence proving Iraqi
complicity or assistance in an Al Qaeda attack."

Those conclusions
have not always been reflected in statements by Bush administration officials,
particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who in their public remarks before the
war and since have attributed more sinister significance to the the links
between Iraq and Al Qaeda than the C.I.A. did in its assessments.

On
the issue of Iraq and illicit weapons, the huge gap between the intelligence
agencies' prewar assertions, most notably in the National Intelligence Estimate
of October 2002, and the fact that no such weapons have been found has been
apparent for more than a year.

What the Senate report added to the
picture was the conclusion that the intelligence assessments about Iraq were not
just wrong, but that they were generally unfounded and were based on very little
new information gathered after 1998. That was when United Nations inspectors
left Iraq, removing the eyes and ears on which the United States had heavily
relied.

Among the most glaring errors committed by the agencies, the
committee said, was a failure to "accurately or adequately explain the
uncertainties" behind their judgments, particularly those spelled out in the
National Intelligence estimate of 2002, which stated conclusively that Iraq
possessed chemical and biological weapons program and was reconstituting its
nuclear program.

That approach, the committee said, violated what had
long been understood in the intelligence community to be the central
responsibility of "clearly conveying to policy makers the difference between
what intelligence analysts know, what they don't know, what they think, and to
make sure that policy makers understand the difference."

More broadly,
it said, a "group think" dynamic inside American intelligence agencies
generated, from the mid-1990's, "a collective presumption that Iraq had an
active and growing weapons program." This internal bias, the report said,
prompted analysts, collectors and managers in the C.I.A. and other agencies "to
interpret ambiguous evidence as being conclusively indicative of a WMD program
as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active or
expanding weapons of mass destructions programs."

Appearing with Mr.
Rockefeller at a news conference on Capitol Hill, Mr. Roberts denounced what he
called "a flawed system" that does not allow American intelligence officials to
do their best work. He described the problems as reflecting "a broken corporate
culture and poor management that cannot simply be solved by additional funding
and personnel."

Mr. McLaughlin, who has been deputy director of central
intelligence since 2000, responded at a hastily arranged news conference at the
C.I.A.'s headquarters, where workmen were still removing a tent erected Thursday
for a farewell ceremony for Mr. Tenet.

"I don't think we have a broken
corporate culture at all," Mr. McLaughlin said. He cited the dismantling of a
nuclear weapons proliferation network led by the Pakistani scientist A. Q.
Khan, and the capture of Qaeda leaders including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as
examples of the intelligence agencies' recent successes, and he portrayed the
failures involving Iraq as reflecting isolated rather than endemic problems.

"Iraq was really a unique situation," he said.

Still, Mr.
McLaughlin disclosed for the first time that the agency had adopted significant
changes as a result of its mistakes in Iraq, including what he described as new
procedures intended to challenge long-held assumptions and a new rule that
future National Intelligence Estimates will be subjected to rigorous
second-guessing before publication.

In the future, Mr. McLaughlin also
said, managers who oversee intelligence-collection efforts will be required to
"submit in writing" an assessment of the credibility of all human intelligence
sources whose information is used as the basis for National Intelligence
Estimates.